by Reza Aslan
“May God increase your kindness,” I said, and slid open the door.
The conductor touched his chest reluctantly and thanked me. Then, just as he was about to step into the corridor, he turned back into the compartment and pointed a trembling finger at the seated couple. “Christian!” he spat in English, his voice brimming with contempt. He slid the doors closed and we heard him make his way noisily down the corridor.
For a moment, no one spoke. I remained standing by the door, gripping the luggage rack as the train tilted through a wide turn. “That was an odd thing to say,” I said with a laugh.
“I’m Jennifer,” the girl said. “This is my husband, Malcolm. Thanks for helping us. Things could have gotten out of hand.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m sure he’s already forgotten all about it.”
“Well, there was nothing to forget,” Malcolm said.
“Of course.”
Suddenly, Malcolm was furious. “The truth is that man has been hovering over us ever since we boarded this train.”
“Malcolm,” Jennifer whispered, squeezing his hand. I tried to catch her eye but she would not look at me. Malcolm was shaking with anger.
“Why would he do that?” I asked.
“You heard him,” Malcolm said, his voice rising. “Because we’re Christians.”
I flinched. It was an involuntary reaction—a mere twitch of the eyebrows—but Jennifer caught it and said, almost in apology, “We’re missionaries. We’re on our way to the Western Sahara to preach the gospel.”
All at once, I understood why the conductor had been shadowing the couple; why he was so rancorous and unforgiving about having caught them in a compromising position. For the first time since entering the compartment I noticed a small, open cardboard box perched between two knapsacks on the luggage rack. The box was filled with green, pocket-sized New Testaments in Arabic translation. There were three or four missing.
“Would you like one?” Jennifer asked. “We’re passing them out.”
EVER SINCE THE ATTACKS of September 11, 2001, pundits, politicians, and preachers throughout the United States and Europe have argued that the world is embroiled in a “clash of civilizations,” to use Samuel Huntington’s now ubiquitous term, between the modern, enlightened, democratic societies of the West and the archaic, barbarous, autocratic societies of the Middle East. A few well-respected academics have carried this argument further by suggesting that the failure of democracy to emerge in the Muslim world is due in large part to Muslim culture, which they claim is intrinsically incompatible with Enlightenment values such as liberalism, pluralism, individualism, and human rights. It was therefore simply a matter of time before these two great civilizations, which have such conflicting ideologies, clashed with each other in some catastrophic way. And what better example do we need of this inevitability than the so-called war on terror?
But just beneath the surface of this misguided and divisive rhetoric is a more subtle, though far more detrimental, sentiment: that this is not so much a cultural conflict as a religious one; that we are not in the midst of a “clash of civilizations,” but rather a “clash of monotheisms.”
The clash-of-monotheisms mentality could be heard in the religiously polarizing, “good versus evil” rhetoric with which the United States launched the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It could be seen in the rising anti-Muslim vehemence that has become so much a part of the mainstream media’s discourse about the Middle East. It could be read in the opinion columns of right-wing ideologues who insist that Islam represents a backward and violent religion and culture totally at odds with “Western” values.
Of course, there is no shortage of anti-Christian and anti-Jewish propaganda in Islam. In fact, it sometimes seems that not even the most moderate preacher or politician in the Muslim world can resist advancing the occasional conspiracy theory regarding “the Crusaders and Jews,” by which most simply mean them: that faceless, colonialist, Zionist, imperialist “other” who is not us. So the clash of monotheisms is by no means a new phenomenon. Indeed, from the earliest days of the Islamic expansion to the bloody wars and inquisitions of the Crusades to the tragic consequences of colonialism and the cycle of violence in Israel/Palestine, the hostility, mistrust, and often violent intolerance that has marked relations among Jews, Christians, and Muslims has been one of Western history’s most enduring themes.
Over the last few years, however, as international conflicts have increasingly been framed in apocalyptic terms and political agendas on all sides couched in theological language, it has become impossible to ignore the startling similarities between the antagonistic and uninformed rhetoric that fueled the destructive religious wars of the past, and that which drives the current conflicts of the Middle East. When the Reverend Jerry Vines, past president of the Southern Baptist Convention, calls the Prophet Muhammad “a demon-possessed pedophile,” he sounds eerily like the medieval papal propagandists for whom Muhammad was the Antichrist and the Islamic expansion a sign of the Apocalypse. When the Republican senator from Oklahoma, James Inhofe, stands before the U.S. Congress and insists that the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East are not political or territorial battles but “a contest over whether or not the word of God is true,” he speaks, knowingly or not, the language of the Crusades.
One could argue that the clash of monotheisms is the inevitable result of monotheism itself. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it not only rejects all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God. If there is only one God, then there may be only one truth, and that can easily lead to bloody conflicts of irreconcilable absolutisms. Missionary activity, while commendable for providing health and education to the impoverished throughout the world, is nonetheless predicated on the belief that there is but one path to God, and that all other paths lead toward sin and damnation.
Malcolm and Jennifer, as I discovered on our way to Marrakech, were part of a rapidly growing movement of Christian missionaries who have increasingly begun to focus on the Muslim world. Because Christian evangelism is often bitterly reproached in Muslim countries—thanks in large part to the lingering memory of the colonial endeavor, when Europe’s disastrous “civilizing mission” went hand in hand with a fervently anti-Islamic “Christianizing mission”—some evangelical institutions now teach their missionaries to “go undercover” in the Muslim world by taking on Muslim identities, wearing Muslim clothing (including the veil), even fasting and praying as Muslims. At the same time, the United States government has encouraged large numbers of Christian aid organizations to take an active role in rebuilding the infrastructures of Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of the two wars, giving ammunition to those who seek to portray the occupation of those countries as another Crusade of Christians against Muslims. Add to this the perception, held by many in the Muslim world, that there is collusion between the United States and Israel against Muslim interests in general and Palestinian rights in particular, and one can understand how Muslims’ resentment and suspicion of the West has only increased, and with disastrous consequences.
Considering how effortlessly religious dogma has become intertwined with political ideology, how can we overcome the clash-of-monotheisms mentality that has so deeply entrenched itself in the modern world? Clearly, education and tolerance are essential. But what is most desperately needed is not so much a better appreciation of our neighbor’s religion as a broader, more complete understanding of religion itself.
Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith. It is an institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provides a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence. Religion is concerned not with genuine history, but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river. Rather, sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots
dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments when sacred and genuine history collide that religions are born. The clash of monotheisms occurs when faith, which is mysterious and ineffable and which eschews all categorizations, becomes entangled in the gnarled branches of religion.
THIS, THEN, IS the story of Islam. It is a story anchored in the memories of the first generation of Muslims and catalogued by the Prophet Muhammad’s earliest biographers, Ibn Ishaq (d. 768), Ibn Hisham (d. 833), al-Baladhuri (d. 892), and al-Tabari (d. 922). At the heart of the story is the Glorious Quran—the divine revelations Muhammad received during a span of some twenty-three years in Mecca and Medina. While the Quran, for reasons that will become clear, tells us very little about Muhammad’s life (indeed, Muhammad is rarely mentioned in it), it is invaluable in revealing the ideology of the Muslim faith in its infancy: that is, before the faith became a religion, before the religion became an institution.
Still, we must never forget that as indispensable and historically valuable as the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet may be, they are nevertheless grounded in mythology. It is a shame that this word, myth, which originally signified nothing more than stories of the supernatural, has come to be regarded as synonymous with falsehood, when in fact myths are always true. By their very nature, myths inhere both legitimacy and credibility. Whatever truths they convey have little to do with historical fact. To ask whether Moses actually parted the Red Sea, or whether Jesus truly raised Lazarus from the dead, or whether the word of God indeed poured through the lips of Muhammad, is to ask irrelevant questions. The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is “What do these stories mean?”
The fact is that no evangelist in any of the world’s great religions would have been at all concerned with recording his or her objective observations of historical events. They would not have been recording observations at all! Rather, they were interpreting those events in order to give structure and meaning to the myths and rituals of their community, providing future generations with a common identity, a common aspiration, a common story. After all, religion is, by definition, interpretation; and by definition, all interpretations are valid. However, some interpretations are more reasonable than others. And as the Jewish philosopher and mystic Moses Maimonides noted so many years ago, it is reason, not imagination, which determines what is probable and what is not.
The way scholars form a reasonable interpretation of a particular religious tradition is by merging that religion’s myths with what can be known about the spiritual and political landscape in which those myths arose. By relying on the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet, along with our understanding of the cultural milieu in which Muhammad was born and in which his message was formed, we can more reasonably reconstruct the origins and evolution of Islam. This is no easy task, though it is made somewhat easier by the fact that Muhammad appears to have lived “in the full view of history,” to quote Ernest Renan, and died an enormously successful prophet (something for which his Christian and Jewish detractors have never forgiven him).
Once a reasonable interpretation of the rise of Islam in sixth- and seventh-century Arabia has been formed, it is possible to trace how Muhammad’s revolutionary message of moral accountability and social egalitarianism was gradually reinterpreted by his successors into competing ideologies of rigid legalism and uncompromising orthodoxy, which fractured the Muslim community and widened the gap between mainstream, or Sunni, Islam and its two major branches, Shi‘ism and Sufism. Although sharing a common sacred history, each group strove to develop its own interpretation of scripture, its own ideas on theology and the law, and its own community of faith. And each had different responses to the experience of colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, that experience forced the entire Muslim community to reconsider the role of faith in modern society. While some Muslims pushed for the creation of an indigenous Islamic Enlightenment by eagerly developing Islamic alternatives to Western secular notions of democracy, others advocated separation from Western cultural ideals in favor of the complete “Islamization” of society. With the end of colonialism and the birth of the Islamic state in the twentieth century, these two groups have refined their arguments against the backdrop of the ongoing debate in the Muslim world over the prospect of forming a genuine Islamic democracy. But as we shall see, at the center of the debate over Islam and democracy is a far more significant internal struggle over who gets to define the Islamic Reformation that is already under way in most of the Muslim world.
The reformation of Christianity was a terrifying process, but it was not, as it has so often been presented, a collision between Protestant reform and Catholic intransigence. Rather, the Christian Reformation was an argument over the future of the faith—a violent, bloody argument that engulfed Europe in devastation and war for more than a century.
Thus far, the Islamic Reformation has proved no different. For most of the Western world, September 11, 2001, signaled the commencement of a worldwide struggle between Islam and the West—the ultimate manifestation of the clash of civilizations. From the Islamic perspective, however, the attacks on New York and Washington were part of an ongoing clash between those Muslims who strive to reconcile their religious values with the realities of the modern world, and those who react to modernism and reform by reverting—sometimes fanatically—to the “fundamentals” of their faith.
This book is not just a critical reexamination of the origins and evolution of Islam, nor is it merely an account of the current struggle among Muslims to define the future of this magnificent yet misunderstood faith. This book is, above all else, an argument for reform. There are those who will call it apostasy, but that is not troubling. No one speaks for God—not even the prophets (who speak about God). There are those who will call it apology, but that is hardly a bad thing. An apology is a defense, and there is no higher calling than to defend one’s faith, especially from ignorance and hate, and thus to help shape the story of that faith, a story which, in this case, began fourteen centuries ago, at the end of the sixth century C.E., in the sacred city of Mecca, the land that gave birth to Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Abd al-Muttalib: the Prophet and Messenger of God. May peace and blessings be upon him.
Author’s Note
While there is a widely recognized system for the transliteration of Arabic into English, along with specific diacritical markings to indicate long and short vowels, I have endeavored, for the sake of clarity and ease, to present all Arabic words in their simplest and most recognizable English rendering. The Arabic letter hamza, which is rarely vocalized, will occasionally be marked with an apostrophe. The letter ain—best pronounced as a glottal stop—will be marked with a reverse apostrophe, as in the word bay‘ah, meaning “oath.” Further, rather than pluralizing Arabic nouns according to their proper grammatical rules, I will simply add an s: thus, Kahins, instead of Kuhhan.
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of the Quran are my own.
Chronology of Key Events
570 Birth of the Prophet Muhammad
610 Muhammad receives first Revelation at Mt. Hira
622 Muslim emigration (Hijra) to Yathrib (later called Medina)
624 Battle of Badr against Mecca and the Quraysh
625 Battle of Uhud
627 Battle of the Trench
628 Treaty of Hudaybiyyah between Medina and Mecca
630 Muhammad’s victory over the Quraysh and the Muslim occupation of Mecca
632 Muhammad dies
632–634 Caliphate of Abu Bakr
634–644 Caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab
644–656 Caliphate of Uthman ibn Affan
656–661 Caliphate of Ali ibn Abi Talib, considered the first Imam of Shi‘ism
661–750 The Umayyad Dynasty
680 Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, killed at
Karbala
750–850 The Abbasid Dynasty
756 Last Umayyad prince, Abd al-Rahman, establishes rival Caliphate in Spain
874 The occultation of the Twelfth Imam, or the Mahdi
934–1062 Buyid Dynasty rules western Iran, Iraq, and Mesopotamia
969–1171 Fatimid Dynasty rules North Africa, Egypt, and Syria
977–1186 Ghaznavid Dynasty rules Khurasan, Afghanistan, and northern India
1095 Christian Crusades launched by Pope Urban II
1250–1517 Mamluk Dynasty rules Egypt and Syria
1281–1924 The Ottoman Empire
1501–1725 Safavid Dynasty rules Iran
1526–1858 Mughal Dynasty rules India
1857 The Indian Revolt against the British
1924 Creation of secular Turkish republic and the end of the Ottoman Caliphate
1925 Beginning of Pahlavi Dynasty in Iran
1928 The Society of Muslim Brothers founded by Hasan al-Banna in Egypt
1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia established
1947 Pakistan founded as first Islamic state
1948 State of Israel established
1952 Free Officers revolt in Egypt, led by Gamal Abd al-Nasser
1979 Soviets invade Afghanistan
1980 Iran Hostage Crisis
1987 First Intifada, or Palestinian Uprising
1988 Hamas founded
1989 Soviet army pulls out of Afghanistan
1991 The Persian Gulf War; al-Qaeda formed
1992 Algerian Civil War
2000 Second Intifada in Israel/Palestine
2001 Al-Qaeda attack on New York and Washington
2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq
2006 Hamas wins elections in Palestine
2008 Israeli invasion of Gaza